Like for example the FBI attempts to discredit Martin Luther King Jr. by painting him as a womanizer. Or the CIA’s 1967 project Operation CHAOS, designed to monitor the student antiwar movement. Or the FBI’s attempts under COINTELPRO in the late sixties to undermine what it called “black nationalist hate groups” by inciting rivalries among them.

I’m kind of a categorization geek, so I liked Marx’s crisp table of the ways in which folks have aimed to covertly undermine the movements that they found threatening. By investigating and harassing participants, and discrediting leaders. Fomenting internal conflict: encouraging jealousy, suspicion, factionalism and personal animosity. Spreading damaging misinformation. Undermining morale and thwarting recruitment efforts. Undermining activities that generate revenue. Encouraging hostility between the movement and its potential allies and partners. Creating similar organizations that compete for resources and public mindshare. Sabotaging events and projects. And so forth.

Reading all this, I started thinking about Wikimedia, which is of course a sort of social movement. Our goal is to make information easily available for people everywhere around the world – free of commercialism, free of charge, free of bias. That’s a radical mission.

Given that, it’s interesting to look at how external entities have responded to Wikipedia’s extraordinary success – especially those who have reason (or think they might have reason) to feel threatened by it.

So for example, the media. Conventional media business models are crumbling, and media organizations are struggling to persuasively articulate their value proposition. Some see Wikipedia as a competitor. So it doesn’t surprise me that –with a fervour that can border on the obsessive– some media talk so relentlessly about why Wikipedia can’t succeed, and make predictions about how quickly, and in what manner, it will fail. Cultural and educational and PR organizations have less of a megaphone, but apart from that their initial responses have been pretty similar. [2]

None of that is surprising. What has surprised me though, is the other side of the balance sheet.

Marx posits a world in which detractors work against a social movement, and supporters work in favour of it.

At Wikimedia, we’ve had our share of detractors. But I’ve found myself more surprised by the other side — surprised that Wikimedia’s most articulate and passionate supporters –its core editors– don’t do more to promote its success.

Here are some of the things Marx says people can do to support social movements:

Work to create a favourable public image for the movement

Support participants and help recruit new participants

Help with effective communications

Support revenue-generating activities

Build and sustain participant morale

Build and support leaders

Encourage internal solidarity: support kindness, understanding, generosity and a sense of common purpose

Encourage external solidarity: support the development of common cause between the movement and its potential allies and partners

Support movement events and projects.

I want to be clear: lots of Wikimedia editors (and other supporters) do this work. We have a communications committee which is sometimes remarkably effective. The Wikimedia network of international chapters is excellent at outreach work – particularly the German chapter, which pioneered the Wikipedia Academy concept, and lots of other initiatives. Editorial and movement leadership emerges almost entirely organically at Wikimedia, and I have seen it warmly and enthusiastically supported. And we have some really terrific editors working tirelessly to develop strategic partnerships with cultural and educational institutions. So there is lots of good work being done.

But even so: sometimes when I read our mailing lists, I laugh out loud at how Wikimedians can be our own worst enemies. We subject each other to relentless scrutiny — criticizing our own leaders and supporters and activities, monitoring, speculating, worrying, and poking and prodding each other. All, frequently, in public.

I’ve been trying to figure out why we’re like this. And I think there are two main contributing factors. One is, Wikipedians are engaged first and foremost in building an encyclopedia, and knowledge workers of the encyclopedia-writing type are famously fussy, fastidious, fact-obsessed and obsessive about neutrality. So it makes sense that neutrality is a value that extends to our communications about the Wikimedia projects. We don’t want to shill for anybody, including, LOL, ourselves.

Second though is the disease of paranoia, which seems unavoidable in social movements. Anybody who’s committed themselves to working to advance a cause, particularly voluntarily –and who has only very limited control over the rest of their social movement– is vulnerable to paranoia. It makes sense: you’ve worked incredibly hard for something you care about a lot, without any expectation of reward, so of course you worry that others could destroy what you’ve accomplished.

(Lawyer and writer Bill Eddy tossed off a fascinating aside in his book High-Conflict People in Legal Disputes – to the effect that groups often instinctively elevate the most paranoid among them into leadership positions. Essentially because although hyper-paranoid leaders may often mistake innocence for evil, it can at least be assumed that they will never do the reverse. As in Michael Shermer‘s TED talk: better a false positive, than a false negative that results in being eaten by a predator.) The upshot: social movements often exist in a kind of amplified state of vigilance, which is probably occasionally useful, but equally often just wasted effort, or carries with it an opportunity cost, or is just really destructive.

Personally, I would like to see the core Wikimedia community better support itself and its own success.

[1] From Gary Marx’s chapter “External Efforts to Damage or Facilitate Social Movements: Some Patterns, Explanations, Outcomes, and Complications,” in the book The Dynamics of Social Movements, edited by M. Zald and J. McCarthy, Winthrop Publishers, 1979.

[2] I should be careful to be clear here. First, Wikimedia’s got lots of supporters — and we’ve always had strong supporters in traditional media. I don’t want conventional media to see Wikipedia as a threat and I don’t think it is a threat: I think Wikipedia’s a useful complement, part of a balanced information diet. Second, everybody’s reaction to Wikipedia has gotten warmer over time, as Wikipedia’s earned credibility. But the original systemic pressures haven’t changed: they are still what they always were.

I’m responding both to your general suggestion that Wikipedians come together and stop criticizing their leaders, and to this comment: “We subject each other to relentless scrutiny — criticizing our own leaders and supporters and activities, monitoring, speculating, worrying, and poking and prodding each other. All, frequently, in public. I’ve been trying to figure out why we’re like this.”

The reason, of course, is that Wikipedia’s policymaking de facto takes the form of random conversation, ill-managed straw polls, and any “consensus” that results (or whatever someone can pass off as such). The conversation is subject to a zillion vague, easily manipulable rules. In such a governance situation, the only way to get your agenda passed is by intimidation, shouting down the opposition, etc.–in short, it’s mob rule. You shouldn’t be too surprised if what has been set up and perpetuated as a mob acts like a mob.

Your proposal, that there be less criticism of community leaders, will not be successful unless you change the basic constraints of the community. It sounds like a hint that people simply knuckle under to the leaders of the mob. Not only is that actually offensive to democratic sensibilities, it couldn’t possibly work.

The alternative–which won’t make things radically more polite, but maybe a little–is to start an actual legislative body, constrained by a community charter. Forcefully assert the fundamental injustice of the current policymaking/governance scheme, throw off your community’s ridiculous notions of a “benevolent monarch” and impossible “consensus,” and insist that there be a consitutional convention in which the rules governing policymaking are hammered out. Moreover, to avoid the fate of all one-party state, invite the formation of competing parties.

Then let constitutional democracy work its magic. The world’s knowledge deserves nothing less. Otherwise you are left with “the slum of all human knowledge,” I’m afraid.

If you want a reduction in criticism, you have to start by being frank, honest, and realistic about what you’re actually doing, and this blog post doesn’t exactly get the job done.

You start out as badly as can be imagined by comparing Wikipedia’s critics to CIA and FBI “dirty tricks” operations in the 60’s and 70’s. How can you possibly be this out-of-touch with reality? The civil rights and anti-war movements were meant to promote social justice, and force a recalcitrant government to abandon destructive and short-sighted policies. Wikipedia doesn’t do either of those things – it’s a publishing platform, not a “social movement,” and the fact that it has no clear or well-defined political agenda is a GOOD thing. These comparisons actually undermine your own “mission.”

To say that “some” (in the media) “see Wikipedia as a competitor” is simply dishonest – Wikipedia *is* a competitor to traditional media; there is absolutely no question of this. “The media” has every right to be angry about the fact that their businesses and jobs are being threatened by an amorphous, anonymous mob who operate under no pretense of professionalism or editorial standards, who often do not respond well to calls for them to be socially responsible, and who are being supported by a tax-advantaged hosting operation that calls itself a “charity.” If Wikimedia is a charity, then the New York Times, Random House, and even Fox News are also charities. If you want fairness from your “external” critics, you should either abandon your own tax-advantaged status, or demand that all of those competing entities be given the same status as you (as absurd as that sounds). Even then, your ability to rely on unpaid labor and preferential search-engine rankings to maintain high page-view figures would leave them with a badly-tilted playing field.

In short, I suspect that most commercial media companies would LOVE to abandon their reliance on advertising and subscription revenue, stop paying their employees while still having them show up for work each day, and rely instead on donations from foundations and private philanthropists. But they can’t, can they?

Finally, the reason Wikipedia’s “core editors” don’t do more to promote Wikipedia is because they understand – better than you do, by far – the potential danger Wikipedia represents to a civil society. And I’m talking about *everything,* not just ideological bias or child porn or people being extensively profiled on an anonymously-editable “encyclopedia” without their consent. This is why so many of the core editors don’t want to identify themselves, and people who don’t identify themselves generally don’t get “out front” to promote anything, much less the very thing they’re worried about (even if they enjoy participating in it despite all of that). Besides, what would be the reward for them? Money? Fame? Free stuff? More friends on Facebook? Think about how you can make *being a Wikipedian* something to really be proud of, so that more than just a handful of people pubilcly admit to it, and you’ll be on your way to solving your problem.

“You may resist the invasion of armies, but you can’t resist the invasion of ideas.” —Victor Hugo

21st Century concepts of good governance comprise an idea whose time has come.

Sue, the Wikimedia Foundation has an unexploited and undeveloped opportunity to play a leadership role in promoting the highest ideals expressed in the WMF Mission Statement and Values Statement, of empowering and engaging scholars around the world to collect and develop high quality educational content for other students, educators, and scholars around the world.

The sum of all human knowledge includes some 4000 years of political history that we may call the Advance of Civilization.

Among those advances are fundamental concepts of Due Process, Civil Rights, Equal Protection, and Evidence-Based Judgments that represent the hardest fought gains in all of human history. Sue, I would like to see you and others in leadership positions at the Wikimedia Foundation embrace and demonstrate modern 21st Century concepts of good governance, beginning with a sincere and whole-hearted demonstration of the most fundamental and basic ideas of good government and managerial ethics.

A few years ago, Lar, Sam Korn, and others pointed out that Wikipedia does not do Due Process, which is why the oftimes erratic process of conflict resolution has been a perennial source of embarrasingly absurd political drama that frequently reprises some of the most famous episodes in the annals of human history.

It does not behoove the Foundation or its public projects to regress to atrociously anachronistic and totemic tribal practices that predate the advent of the Rule of Law.

The time has come, Sue, to evolve to 21st Century notions of good government, managerial ethics, and best practices for a donor-funded online educational outreach program.

@Sue re underminers: I like the samurai Miyamoto Musashi’s tactical philosophy in The Book of Five Rings … to consider enemy soldiers as your own troops. (If that philosophy is not fruitful, then employ ninjas. :-)

@Larry re constitutional democracy: With a time machine, that level of (yes, conceptually beautiful) design might be installed — without one, problematic flows in a successful system (as Wikipedia surely has been) can probably most effectively be addressed by addition of a few well-chosen “chaos rules.” (And see parenthetical in @Sue. ;-)

[…] Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, recently blogged about Wikimedia as “a sort of social movement“. Gardner asked why it is that Wikimedians don’t do more to encourage internal […]

I think that sometimes we overuse the words community and movement, because mostly WIkipedia is a lonely experience with a single writer of each article. Some fix spelling errors all day, perhaps because they have nothing better to do. Maybe they are depressed or dysfunctional. And that’s not a bad thing. Wikipedia offers an opportunity for these people to do some good, instead of just watching television. But we can’t expect all of them to show up at meetings or do outreach work.

On the other hand, there are many who should be able do outreach work without writing Wikipedia. There are far more people who read Wikipedia than who write. Millions of people use the English Wikipedia, but only 40,000 make more than 5 edits in a regular month. For the Swedish Wikipedia, that is 1,000 regular editors and for smaller languages even fewer. As a comparison, there are 4 to 8 times more librarians than wikipedians. Add journalists, teachers and students, and we have far more regular readers than writers. These are our bigger community, and some of them should be able to help in the outreach.

“Personally, I would like to see the core Wikimedia community better support itself and its own success.”

I think everybody would like to see this. But the question is: how do we achieve it? Mabe you gotta give the (core) community more tools to do so and probably MediaWiki and whole Wikimedia is not accessible enough so that the core community is just unable to get right with itself for now…

One of the core tools for the success of an enterprise is the faculty for sober self-evaluation.

Peter Senge, more than anyone, has written brilliantly on how to build a successful “Learning Organization” that continually strives for “Ethical Best Practices” that are the hallmark of successful organizations.

Here, for example, are three core traits of successful Learning Organizations, according to Peter Senge:

1. Excel at seeing systems. Successful Learning Organizations recognize basic system phenomena everywhere — limits to success, shifting the burden to the intervener, accidental adversaries. In particular, they see the system independent of organizational boundaries.

2. Collaborate across boundaries with ease. Successful Learning Organizations know how to get the whole system in the room and respect the different interests and perspectives of all stakeholders, making it possible to build their social networks and realize breakthrough innovations.

3. Move easily from problem solving to creating. Fear and anxiety can definitely motivate action, but rarely does it encourage our best contributions or sustained effort. These leaders are both pragmatic – they’re always prototyping and experimenting – one definition of creating. Successful Learning Organizations are also oriented toward possibility, evoking inspiration and creativity throughout the system.

Sue, please take some time to examine the Five Disciplines that Peter Senge identifies as important faculties for any successful Learning Organization. The Five Disciplines are:

1. Personal Mastery is a discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively.

2. Mental Models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action.

3. Building Shared Vision is a practice of unearthing shared pictures of the future that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance.

4. Team Learning starts with dialogue, the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into genuine thinking together.

5. Systems Thinking is the Fifth Discipline that integrates the first four.

The Wikimedian approach is to call this half-empty. You seem to be suggesting that it be called half-full. Neither descriptor changes the reality, which is that it hasn’t reached its potential. And both are, for the most part, meaningless labels. It doesn’t particularly matter which you use, so advocating that we pick the one that serves nothing more than making the public relations people happier is silly and short-sighted.

Are people ruthless sometimes on foundation-l and in other public venues? Sure. In my opinion, this is an attempt to karmically balance out the cultish circle-jerks that exist in the non-public venues.

Ultimately, it isn’t about what the critics are saying, though. It’s about why the critics have so much to say. Empty comments don’t capture the conversation. Substantive criticisms do. And it’s the substantive criticisms of the Wikimedia Foundation’s actions (or inactions) that are the real problem that need to be addressed. Wikipedia isn’t being hurt by mean words on foundation-l or on the Wikipedia Review or anywhere else. It’s being hurt by the poor and short-sighted choices of those put in charge of running it. Don’t blame those who point this out.

P.S. I know I asked a few others to pass this along, but while I’m here and commenting, I’ll say so myself: I think your blog tagline is brilliant. :-)

I have found it uncommonly difficult to submit constructive criticisms, no matter how tactfully worded they are.

For reasons not entirely clear to me, the denizens of Wikiculture label almost any feedback as a “personal attack” or as “trolling.”

Such feedback is commonly dismissed, disregarded, or simply reverted in a manner that often borders on churlishness.

It is in these situations that social critics have traditionally turned to humor, including satire and parody, to communicate their message. It’s a folk theorem that when those in power don’t take their critics seriously, their critics turn to the art of ridicule.

Thanks MZMcBride. I must give credit where it’s due: the tagline is courtesy of Erik :-)

For the rest of your post though — at the risk of sounding truculent, I have to say that you talking about “poor and short-sighted choices” and how the critics “have so much to say” is exactly the kind of reflexive, unsubstantiated negativity I’m talking about. Substantive criticisms are of course legitimate and can be useful; it’s blanket overstatements that I find unhelpful. And more so than unhelpful, I find them kind of perplexing.

I say that with respect, because I know that you do good work on the projects, including helping the Wikimedia Foundation staff quite a bit. You are a puzzle to me, MZMcBride :-)

But for Barry — yes, I agree with you. Ridicule and negativity are symptoms of people feeling powerless and unheard; they don’t come out of nowhere. I guess the good news is that they also suggest people are personally invested and engaged. So, the only thing worse than relentless criticism would be silence :-)

Barry, I can’t speak for Sue’s moderation policy, but those numbers likely count spam, too. My blog, for instance, is up in the 6200s for comment id numbers, but about 5900 of that is stuff that was caught by the spam filter.

Yeah. Barry is actually paying closer attention than I am; I don’t know what proportion of the comments I’m deleting. I approve the majority, but not all. And I’m often not at my laptop, so I apologize to people who submit a comment that sits in a queue for hours.

I’ll probably write up a comments policy at some point, but the gist is that I approve everything that I think adds value to the discussion. In general, I think about the signal-to-noise ratio: I want to create a space that’s conducive to thoughtful conversation :-)

(Disclaimer: I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, so my comments here should be interpreted as servile flattery.)

I noticed the same phenomenon at Flickr and Upcoming.org, so I don’t think it has anything to do with Wikimedia per se. There is a strange insistence among Wikimedians that civility is irrelevant, but the basic forms of conflict are the same.

I think there’s two factors at play.

1) The more powerful the user, the more the site operators are his or her enemy.

There is a user at Flickr who has an enormous photo collection and something like 20,000 subscribers and commenting in hundreds of groups. He’s based a photography business out of Flickr. He probably spends hours every day just maintaining his Flickr account.

You’d think he’d love Flickr, but no. He is always leading user revolts, blogging his speculations about the malevolence or incompetence of the programmers or managers,and once even tried to start a Flickr competitor.

As far as I can tell this kind of behavior is *common* among the top users on any social site. It’s true that power users do experience some technical issues that others never face, but I don’t think this explains the bizarre inappropriateness of their actions.

I think the only way you can explain this is that they are “social climbers”, at least with regards to Internet-based social systems. And they’ve ascended to the very apex. The only remaining competitors in status are the people who run the site. So they don’t feel that they’re “winning” unless the site operators are paying attention to them personally, and even making policy changes just to accommodate them.

Wikimedia is not a social site per se, but there is a community and people are accorded various degrees of respect, so I think this applies.

2) The more the user derives their identity from the site, the more often they have to confront their own impotence.

There’s a difficult bargain when it comes to community sites. In many ways the community can offer a sort of home to the user. Sometimes the invitation to feel like you’re part of a community is quite explicit. But then every now and then there are rude reminders that they don’t actually control it — the interface changes, features are dropped, the administrators start going in a different direction. In my opinion this is part of what causes the frothing rage that power users can feel over even the most trivial changes.

It’s not so much the actual harm or inconvenience caused by the changes, as it is how it violates their sense of personal space and ownership.

I write here as someone who intends to put in 35 to 40 hours a week on Wikipedia work. I’m a recovering alcoholic and I am disabled to an extent that prevents me from taking on employment. Those hours are my goal which may not always be met due to the challenges I face.

I wouldn’t say Wikipedia is my “home”, it’s more my job. A great job. The sort of job I would have applied for.

I’ve heard people say that you should find yourself a job that you would do for free and then you will be happy. I don’t think they meant you ought to find one that actually doesn’t pay but, hell, them’s the breaks.

And so, speaking from this perspective, I find I don’t have too much criticism to make of the WMF. I find next year’s budget / spending forecast rather scary, though this is mitigated by knowing that it will be constantly reviewed in light of what actually happens with regard to fundraising and plans will be reined in if necessary.

Sometimes I see a community decision that I wish would have gone the other way. But I find this doesn’t enrage me. It’s such a large project and moves so quickly that any individual decision I don’t like passes into memory rather than remaining a festering boil.

For every negative I encounter I am deluged with positives. Perhaps this is because I spend a lot of time at places where there’s not too much by way of intense argument. I would recommend everyone do a tour of duty on Featured Article Candidates; that way you get to see some of the very best of what Wikipedia can offer. Also, reading Signpost every week (which led me to this blog post) I find gives me a huge dose of gratification; it makes me aware of the great variety of activity that’s going on 24 hours a day all through the year – a real sense of being part of something important.

I think perhaps some people get too bound up in the politics of Wikipedia. I think they should take a break sometimes and return to our product: articles.

As for evangelising, which Sue would like us to do, I confess I do a bit, but should do more. I also confess that – depending on who I’m speaking to – instead of saying “I work on Wikipedia” I may tend to say “I volunteer for a charity”.

I had considered that perhaps saying the latter was both unjust to Wikipedia by avoiding the mention and perhaps self-aggrandising. But when I think about it I realise that a great many people I’ve spoken to, when asked what they do, tend not to mention the name of their organisation. You’ll more likely hear someone say “I’m an electrician” than “I’m employed by X Electrical Co.” or “I’m a train driver” than “I work for London Underground”.

Since I do more than edit articles I can’t really say “I’m an editor” or “I’m a proof-reader” or “I’m a strategist”. So I think I will continue trying to get cache by taking the morally lofty stance of “charity worker”, God knows my public persona needs a helping hand :O)

As to paranoia, I do sometimes feel paranoid. I sometimes feel that what we have created is very fragile. However, let’s say the worst imaginable disaster befell Wikipedia; the site disappeared, was no longer available except as a legacy file available as a torrent. I would still think that what had been created was great and important. It would still be a defining moment of Web 2.0. It would be remembered for a long time.

Happily there’s little sense that such a disaster is likely to come about. Realistically, I think the greatest problem I see on the horizon is the possibility that nearly all news sources (the BBC excepted) might end up behind a paywall, giving us a ‘reliable sources crisis’.

Whoops, I appear to have hopped about all over the place in subject matter here. I’ll leave it at that for now. Good to see Sue has a blog. I will subscribe and look forward to future posts.